Guidelines for Paper Submissions

Despite the outdated advice clinging to the world wide web (you know, the Internet), paper submissions are no longer widely accepted. Here are the last known formatting standards for them, just in case you come across a publisher who asks you to mail your story through the post office.

Use black type on white paper.

Print only on one side of the page.

Use Courier or Times New Roman for the font. *

When using Courier, double-space after sentence-ending periods (a.k.a. full stops).

Yes, it looks old-fashioned, but Courier is a mono-spaced font, which means seeing sentence breaks is hard without the extra space.

Don’t do this when instructed to use proportional fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial.

Underline words that you want italicized in its final form. Italics are notoriously hard to for readers and typesetters (with print publications) to see in the middle of the night of the night after five cups of coffee.